They Fall in Love
by I'm All Teeth
Summary: No matter how the story begins, it always ends the same way. They fall in love. Absolutely fluffy.


**Author's note: I don't own anyone from Harry Potter, JKR does. I don't, interestingly enough, own the story format, either. It was shamelessly stolen from a short story that someone showed me once several (five) years ago that follows roughly the same format (I swear this comment makes more sense if you just read the story). I don't, unfortunately, know the name or author of this story anymore. Just know that it was not mine first, and if you _do_ know the author and title of the piece I'm talking about PLEASE let me know so that I can properly credit this. **

They Fall In Love

_No matter how the story starts, it always ends the same way..._

**One**

It's the first day of school. He's eleven and she's going to be twelve in less than a month. He is well off, of good standing in society, and his favorite activity is watching his father get ready for work in the morning. She is well off, too, only in a completely different world, and she's terrified that she doesn't really belong here; that she's going to get off of this train and they're going to tell her that they made a mistake and that she is not, in fact, a witch.

He has friends and he is eager to make more. His father wants him to befriend Harry Potter because Harry Potter is already famous and he is only eleven. The first boy she meets on the train has teeth that are worse than hers and he is crying because he lost his toad. Personally, she doesn't understand why a toad (of all things) is so important to the boy, but he's crying and so she helps him look for it and doesn't ask any questions.

He finds Harry Potter's train compartment only minutes before she does. In fact, she slides open the compartment door and walks right into him.

"Has anyone seen a toad? Neville's lost-" and that's when she runs into him.

They don't fall over together (that would just be stupid) and the train does not choose that exact moment to turn, forcing him to catch her (the Hogwarts Express offers such a smooth ride, it can only be magic; she can't even feel it shake along the tracks). She walks into him and stops talking and he turns around and looks down his sharp nose at her.

They don't fall over together and he doesn't even reach out to touch her but something opens up between them and for the first time in either of their short lives, they are both afraid and excited all at once and neither of them really knows why. They are both too shocked to say anything, and so they stare at each other, standing so close together that their noses were almost touching.

Ron Weasley says something and breaks the moment like glass. She looks at him for the first time and says, "You have dirt on your nose. Did you know that?"

Ron scowls at her, but Draco laughs. She decides that she likes his laugh, and resolves to hear more of it. He likes how to-the-point she is, and that Weasely's only response was to glare and smudge the dirt further around his face. She is a mudblood, and he is supposed to hate her. He is a bigot and a coward and she is not supposed to ever trust his smile. They are both too young to know these things, and probably wouldn't care even if they did.

Because he doesn't know that she is inferior and because she has no clue that he is slimy, they both stay in the train car with Harry Potter and Ronald Weasely. Draco even sends Crabbe and Goyle to help Neville find his toad so that Hermione can stay and talk. The four of them talk about Houses and their families (or lack there of, in Potter's case), and Voldemort. Draco is unendingly impressed with how much Hermione knows. He is beginning to think that "muggle-born" really just means "knows everything." She likes that Draco is quick to defend her when Ron says something fowl (which he does with some frequency).

When the four of them are standing, waiting for the Sorting Ceremony to start, Draco tells Hermione not to be worried, because she is a very clever witch and will undoubtedly be in Slytherin with him. She doesn't really want to be in Slytherin, even if he is there, but he called her a witch and that makes her a little less nervous.

She, Harry, and Ron are all in Gryffindor, and Draco is in Slytherin. She spends the entire feast staring across the Great Hall at him. The other Gryffindors seem nice, but she doesn't know half of the foods that are on the table and she wants to ask someone how ghosts could possibly exist. Draco catches her eye and smirks at her. She smiles back.

Draco is a peripheral figure that first year. When Ron insulted her, she ran crying all the way to the stretch of brick that marked the Slytherin Common Room and waited while a fifth year went in to retrieve Draco, who came out looking very worried. They sat out by the lake, enjoying the giant squid at autumn air. Neither of them even knew that there was a troll in the dungeons until much later, when they came back inside. Both of them were docked points for not being where they should have been, but neither of them really cared.

She had her own adventures with Harry and Ron, but went out of her way to sit next to Draco in class. He did the same for her, no matter what Pansy Parkinson or the older students said. He missed his mother terribly the entire year, and Hermione was the only one he told. At the end of the year, when Quirrell suddenly disappeared and he heard whispers of Harry and "his two friends" in the hospital wing, Draco ran all the way to the infirmary just to see that she was perfectly fine and Madame Pomfrey was just running some routine tests. He didn't leave until she was discharged. She told him everything, and after that Draco decided that he could never trust The Dark Lord because he was responsible for Hermione being in danger.

They exchanged owls all summer, although his were much more interesting than hers were. He spent the summer traveling the wizarding world with his family and she mostly detailed the books she had read. In August, the letters stopped suddenly, and at first Hermione was annoyed, and then she was worried, and finally she was sad. When she saw him through a compartment window on the train ride back to school, she wasn't sure if she should go talk to him or not. Thankfully, he made the decision for her.

"Do you know what a mudblood is?" He asked her so quietly that she had to hold her breath to hear him.

She shook her head. The way her hair flopped from side to side with the motion reminded him of a cocker spaniel. It made his heart ache in a way he had already started to associate with Hermione Jean Granger: The Only Girl Draco Malfoy Talked To (the rest of them were still gross).

"It's a filthy word for Muggle-Born. If anyone ever calls you that word," his lip curled in disgust, "you tell me. My father will make them pay."

She wasn't sure why he was so angry or if she had done something wrong, but she just nodded and remained quietly confused.

When Mrs. Norris was petrified, Draco pulled her aside after class and told her to watch her back. Ron said something sarcastic (but not particularly mean) to Draco, and Hermione responded automatically, taking all of them (even herself) off-guard. Ron made fun of Draco and Hermione for it. He started calling them, "Dramione," because saying their names separately was "too much work."

When it became apparent that only Muggle-borns were being attacked, Draco set up a schedule so that Hermione was always walking with at least one of her friends. Ron and Harry walked with her to breakfast. After breakfast, she walked with them to her morning class. Draco met her after class to walk her to lunch, and then stayed with her in the library while she studied in the afternoon. At dinner, she would sit with Harry and Ron and the three of them would walk back to the common room together.

When Hermione was petrified, Draco blamed himself and took up residence beside her bed in the hospital wing, although he did have to leave for meals and for class (his father had threatened to transfer him to Durmstrang if his grades didn't improve).

In their third year, Hermione accompanied Draco to the hospital wing after his run-in with the Hippogriff.

"I'm dying," moaned Draco, who Hermione had already managed to convince could _walk_ to the hospital wing and _did not need to be carried, Hagrid_. _Stop being a baby._

"You most certainly are not," Replied Hermione. She wouldn't like to think what she would do if he was. Her mind was running in directions she didn't like. What if Hippogriff talons were poisonous? She had never about it before, but that didn't mean it wasn't true. What if there really was some internal damage done and not just Draco being his usual overly dramatic self (even she would admit that he had a flare for the dramatic)? She was so worried that she waited in a chair beside Draco's bed for the whole ten minutes that it took Madame Pomfrey to heal his arm.

"Why are you wearing you arm in a sling?" Hermione asked as they walked aimlessly around the castle, waiting for class to end (Draco had wheedled Hermione into skipping the rest of class with him, he wasn't quite sure how).

"Because it looks like I'm a battle-hardened hero," he replied. Wasn't it obvious?

"I think you look silly."

"Well, you're just a witch. And a muggle-born one at that. How are you supposed to know what looks cool to wizards?"

She punched him in the opposite shoulder, but not hard, and told him that he was too old to be thinking that witches were gross.

Draco did not wear the cast to the Great Hall that evening.

Draco was still trying to convince his father not to have "That Animal" put down when Harry, Ron, and Hermione met Sirius Black for the first time. Draco, who had spent his entire life among Death Eaters didn't really see what the huge deal about Black being on the loose was in the first place, and so was completely accepting of Harry's story. Once he had been informed. Three days after the fact, which annoyed him slightly.

In the summer between their third and fourth year, Draco convinced his parents to buy premium Quidditch World Cup tickets for the same box as Arthur Weasely's family, and although his mother spent the entire time looking like she had something fowl immediately under her nose, Draco had a marvelous time with his friends. He even boasted to Ron and Harry about his Veela ancestry.

"Yeah," Ron had laughed, "You're girly enough to be one."

Draco scowled and spent the rest of the game explaining the philosophy of Quidditch to Hermione. It was a perfect afternoon.

That night, though, his father started imbibing fire whiskey, and shouting to the entire hotel that his son, "had been flirting with a filthy, little, bushy-haired mudblood." When the silver masks materialized on the faces of both of his parents and most of their adult friends, Draco ran all the way to the edge of the woods, where he attempted to look cool for Hermione while telling her to, "Keep her bushy head down unless she wanted to be flashing her knickers in midair."

She ignored the hair comment (he was always saying things like that) and was genuinely scared until Draco put an arm around her shoulders and lead her into the woods. After that, for some reason, although she logically knew she _should_ be scared, she just couldn't feel anything besides the weight of his bony fingers on her arm.

Draco took Hermione to the Yule Ball in their forth year, and Ron punched him in the face, breaking his nose with a sickening squish. Hermione had been furious and hadn't spoken to Ron for two whole months afterwards, although Draco had been much quicker to forgive (once his nose had been repaired with no lasting cosmetic damage and he had sent a return punch that gifted Weasely with an impressively black eye).

They held hands while they watched Harry compete in the last two tasks. When Harry had told them all that Voldemort was back, Draco looked more terrified than all the rest of them combined. He squeezed Hermione's hand until her fingers turned purple.

In their fifth year, Hermione got a Howler from Madame (never Mrs.) Malfoy for playing her son for a fool after Rita Skeeta published an article detailing her romantic relationship with both Draco and Harry. As the head of the Inquisitorial Squad, Draco managed to keep Umbridge's forces away from the DA until some stupid Ravenclaw (_Merietta,_ Hermione told him for the tenth time) snitched directly to Umbridge herself.

When Hermione caught Rita Skeeta in a jar near the end of the semester, Draco was so impressed that he kissed her. In retrospect, that may not have been the best move, since once he started kissing her, he couldn't stop.

Draco ran away from home in his sixth year. He simply stayed at Hogwarts during the school year and went to Hermione's house for Christmas. It was the first time he had been "Among the Muggles" and was absolutely tickled by the Microwave Oven, especially after he blew up an egg in it. Hermione's parents said he could back whenever he wanted (provided he never touch a single cooking device ever again).

He quit school at the end of the year because his parents had disowned him and he could not afford tuition on his own. It really wouldn't be safe for him, anyway, with Dumbledore dead.

Draco spent what should have been his seventh year at school working with Lee Jordan on Potterwatch, although he rarely contributed anything constructive. He was much too worried about Hermione to focus. Of course it had only been the "Golden Gryffindor Trio" to go look for horcruxes. He tried not to be jealous. He knew that Hermione had been closer to Harry than he ever was (_The Boy Who Lived and the Weasel were so close that they may have been lovers,_ Draco thought savagely to himself while peeling potatoes in Mrs. Weasley's kitchen).

What if someone caught Hermione? He knew better than most what Death Eaters did to Muggle-borns. It was even worse than what they did to blood traitors (devilishly handsome young pure-blood wizards who were dating muggle-born witches with bad hair), and he had scars and nightmares from that (the days before he had left home were few but painful).

Word came from somewhere that a battle was coming. That he would be going back to Hogwarts one last time. He just had to be patient for a little bit longer. He could have Hermione all (or mostly) to himself afterwards. He would never let her out of his site after this was all over. He would take her back to the manor (his parents still wanted him to come home, of course, after this mess ended) and they would get married and have one child and they would grow old and boring and tragically well-dressed together. Afterwards. All he had to do was hold out for another month or so.

After the war ended, Draco took over the family business while Hermione repeated her last year of schooling. He tried to dissuade her from pursuing her magical-creature-crusade in the ministry (he'd already given clothes to all of the Malfoy house elves and now paid them all fair wages. Wasn't that enough?). Hermione Granger was adamant, though, and so Draco gave up trying to reason with her.

When he proposed, she said yes. But only after she got her promotion and he had asked twice.

When he asked if she would mind having children, _please_, because he _needed an heir, _she had given him twins probably, he supposed, just to be difficult. They named the children Rose and Scorpius.

When the children went to Hogwarts, both were in Ravenclaw, which was a prefect compromise for their parents, as neither of them were happy.

When the kids had left school and had careers and hesitant families of their own (neither of them wanted the family business, which Draco begrudgingly offered to Ron and Luna's son, Abbott), Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger (she kept her own last name probably, he supposed, just to be difficult) set about living as close to happily ever after as they possibly could. Draco took up Wizard Golf and Hermione wrote mystery novels.

Draco died in a golf course explosion at age ninety-two and Hermione turned the East Wing of Malfoy Manor into the largest library in the wizarding world. She died a year later. Peacefully, in her sleep, with a faint smile on her thin lips.

**Two**

They've known each other since childhood, but didn't get close until after the war.

He was an avid player of wizard golf, and a freak explosion had melted the left side of his face and his right arm. They were magical burns, and so could not be healed by normal means, but were not life-threatening. Draco had money to waste on his appearance, and so he purchased the services of the best healer in the business.

Hermione Granger was the best healer in the business, and although she rarely dealt with cosmetic injuries, Malfoy was offering to make an enormous contribution to the charity of her choosing if she helped him.

Over the next few months, Draco was forced to recognize that there was more to her than a bushy-haired mudblood (although she was still definitely bushy-haired _and_ a mudblood). Hermione, for her part, grew to enjoy the time she spent with her difficult and well-read patient, despite their unhappy past.

She would spend her breaks sitting in the chair beside his bed, and they would pass far too much time arguing about Kafka and Bagshot. One spring evening, while Hermione was sitting in her usual chair, using her hands to illustrate the importance of counter-clockwise stirring in a specific healing potion, Draco noticed suddenly how the light hit her hair in such a way to make it seem glowing. He realized that his mouth moved into a (slightly deformed and melted) smile every time she smiled, even if he wasn't personally happy. She had small wrists and always wore sensible shoes. He realized, very suddenly, that he was in love with her.

But what could he do? He was a deformed man who, even worse, had spent their entire childhood torturing her. He saw the error of his ways, but worried it was too late. He asked to be switched to a different healer.

Hermione, after learning that her favorite patient had asked for a new doctor, could not contain her fury. As soon as her shift ended, she flew like a fiendfyre to Malfoy's room and proceeded to ask (as venomously as she possibly could) why on earth he had requested Healer Finnegan.

Perhaps it was the painkillers that Finnegan had given him (in liberal doses), or maybe it was the fever that the new healer had neglected to notice, or maybe it was just absolute misery and a certainty of rejection that loosened his tongue, but for whatever reason, Draco simply said, "Because I love you, and seeing you every day while knowing I could never have you was killing me."

Hermione backed slowly out of the room, and walked down the hallway, her sensible shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor. She walked faster and faster and by the time she reached the apparition point, she was running and crying and gasping for breath.

It might have ended there. Hermione didn't go to visit Draco at all (although Healer Finnegan had been replaced by an older, more experience Healer). It wasn't that she was avoiding him, though. Oh no. She was thinking.

Two weeks after Draco had returned to the Manor, Hermione sent him an owl asking him to a casual dinner date in Hogsmeade the Friday after next.

Hermione insisted on paying for dinner (probably, he supposed, just to be difficult), so Draco bought the after dinner drinks and kissed her on her doorstep that night.

At some point, Draco proposed. Then he proposed again. He proposed a third time following the party for her promotion to department head, and she finally _finally_ said yes.

They had twins named Rose and Scorpius who were both Ravenclaws and completely unlike either of their parents, which was probably for the best.

Draco started playing golf again, which Hermione had always said would be the death of him.

Sometimes Hermione hated being right.

After that, deaths by golf-explosions featured prominently in the detective novels she had started writing after her retirement, which were getting darker and more hopeless with each passing month.

She turned the Manor into the largest wizarding library on the British Isles and when the time cam, she died peacefully, like letting out a long sigh.

**Three**

They are both muggles, although neither one of them has ever heard this word.

She is an intern at his father's company and at first he is at once fascinated with and repelled by her appearance. Then, he is enthralled by her wit. Next, he is disgusted by her friends, one of whom is a very famous celebrity and the other whose purpose in life Draco never quite discerns. He fights with the latter and gets him nose broken, although the plastic surgeon assures him that no cosmetic damage will be done.

She can't stand him at first because he is an arrogant prat. But there is something endearing in the way he calls her name. Slowly, she finds herself realizing that neither of them like poetry, but both of them like bad kung-fu movies and reading biographies. When Ron punches Draco (and who names their child Draco, anyway?) in the face, she stops talking to Ron for months, and it is only when she examines the potency of her anger that she realizes her concern is not that of a friend, but of something more romantic.

She falls in love suddenly, but can't think of a way to tell him. It tears her up inside, knowing that she wants him so desperately but can never have him (he's engaged to the heiress of another large company). She quits her job and marries Ron, who has always loved her. They have a son named Abbott. Hermione dreams about two young children, who look a little bit like her and a little bit like someone she loved a long time ago and still tries to forget. It feels like a memory she never really had and she always wakes up crying.

Years later, she runs into Draco in a bakery in New York City, which is Just About the Strangest Thing That's Ever Happened to Her. They get to talking. He is a happy widower. She and Ron have been divorced for a decade (they were always just better off as friends). Abbott is in his twenties. Draco has only ever loved Hermione and Hermione, blushing, realizes that she has only ever loved him, too, and that she was a fool to have run off without telling him.

They elope on a beach in New Jersey and retire to Long Island, where she spends her time writing mystery novels and he takes up golf.

Somewhere in the world, a Rose and a Scorpius meet and feel strangely connected. They mistake this for romance and go out on a single date, which is not at all romantic, but a lot of fun. They remain friends, and people frequently ask if they are siblings.

Draco gets struck by lightning whilst playing a game on a perfectly sunny day in June. He is ninety-two.

Hermione never goes back to England, but through phone calls and emails, she establishes Draco's old mansion as the largest public library on the British Isles. Abbott inherits Draco's company.

The months after Draco's death are long and lonely. Whenever she writes anything, it comes out too bleak to be enjoyable. The night she passes away, she dreams about Draco and two small children she thinks she recognizes from somewhere (maybe a movie). She dies with a smile on her face.

**Four**

Voldemort wins the war and Hermione is given to Draco as a prize.

This one is complicated. She cannot, as a rule, love her captor, no matter how lovely her cage may be. He does something to prove to her that he is not a monster. His motivation is, of course, called into question, and it comes to light that he is in love with her and has been for years. Or that he's been working with the Order of the Phoenix all along. Or maybe he gives no explanation and leaves her wondering (he's always had a flare for the dramatic). Whatever the reason, she begins to feel stirrings in a heart she thought had died long ago.

In this scenario, they do not live to a ripe old age. He dies protecting her and she lives to remember him.

The memories aren't all good, but they aren't all bad, either. She has a library of them in her head. She wonders what their children would have looked like.

When death comes for her, she is smiling.

**Five**

In one distinct variation, Hermione marries Ron, sure that the way her heart races when she sees Draco- because they run into each other positively _everywhere_- is due to a life-long hatred. Draco marries Astoria Greengrass, and wakes up some mornings, after a dream he can't quite remember, wondering where his _real_ wife is, and why Daphne's Little Sister is asleep in his bed.

Hermione ignores the way, "My, he's gotten so big!" runs through her head when she sees Scorpio for the first time and Draco resists the urge to hug Rose and scold her for dying her hair such a fowl shade of red (although she still looks like a princess to him).

He dies in a freak golf accident and Astoria inherits his fortune, which she splits with Blaise Zabini, her lover. Hermione grows old and plump and dies with a smile on her face, which her husband doesn't even notices through his tears.

Nobody really likes this version, and so it is mostly ignored.

**Six**

They meet. It doesn't matter when or where. He is usually rich. She is always brilliant.

They fall in love. If they have children, they have twins named Rose and Scorpius.

Death claims them both, the way it claims every frail and beating thing in this world.

**Seven**

They love each other with the sort of passion that poets write about (although neither of them likes poetry).

They die.

**Eight**

Love wins.


End file.
